Then I found Borges, even though he'd never been hidden. Nothing compares to the excitement of your first loves. I had exhausted the entire corpuses of some of my favoured writers, and thought nothing would ever again have that sort of newness and originality I found in my initial explorations. By that point, I had read hundreds of creditable books and identified a number of favourite authors from a baseline of zero, I had developed idiosyncratic tastes and preferences in a deep pool of literature. Prior to first reading something by Borges in 2019, I had thought I would never again come across a writer who could fundamentally surprise and enthral me.
